In an effort to increase the processing speed and flexibility of traditional high-speed supercomputers that utilize vector processors in a minimally parallel computer processing system, the cluster architecture for highly parallel multiprocessors described in previously identified parent application, Ser. No. 07/459,083 provides a supercomputer architecture that extends the direct-connection methods of inter-processor communication of minimally parallel computer processing systems to encompass greater numbers of processors. While this architecture effectively addresses the problem of interprocessor communication and coordination for highly parallel computer processing systems, it does not offer an effective alternative to the massively parallel single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) or multiple-instruction, multiple data (MIMD) processor array systems that operate on extremely parallel problems. For these types of extremely parallel or very fine grain parallelism problems, the individual power of the processing element is not as important as the total number of processing elements that can be used in parallel. Because traditional vector processor supercomputers have a limited number of processors, they have generally not been used for these types of problems.
Another type of extremely parallel problem that cannot be efficiently solved with a traditional vector processor or an array processor, or a massively parallel computer processing system is extremely parallel bit-level boolean operations, particularly bit matrix manipulations. An example of such an extremely parallel bit manipulation problem is the transposition of an N.times.N bit array. Certain standalone, hardwired bit manipulation machines have been created for very specialized purposes that would be capable of efficiently performing this type of bit-level manipulation; however, none of the more general purpose computer processing systems have the capability to efficiently perform extremely parallel bit-manipulation operations.
Although some extremely parallel SIMD and MIMD problems can be solved using traditional massively parallel or array processor supercomputers, it would be desirable to provide a method and apparatus that would enable other types of supercomputers to also effectively work on these extremely parallel problems. More particularly, it would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus that could efficiently solve extremely parallel bit-level boolean operations without requiring the use of a standalone, specialized hardwired processor that is independent from a general purpose computer processing system.